Daniel Varujan

Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915) was an Armenian poet of the early twentieth century, writing in Western Armenian within the Ottoman Empire. He was killed at the age of 31, just as his work was gaining international attention, during the deportation and murder of Armenians that formed part of the genocide. His significance lies in giving voice to the hope for cultural renewal of a people under threat.

He was born Daniel Tchboukkarian in a village near Sivas, in Anatolia. After the local school, in 1896, the year of the Hamidian massacres, he was sent to Istanbul, where he studied at the Mkhitarian school. He continued in Venice and in 1905 entered Ghent University in Belgium, where he studied literature, sociology and economics. He returned to his village and taught there for three years, and after his marriage to Araksi in 1912 he became head of a school in Istanbul.

In 1914 he co-founded the Mehean literary group and a magazine with other writers. The name means temple. They aimed to revive an Armenian culture they saw as fragmented, reconnecting it to its pre-Christian past and defending independence against tyranny, both from corrupt local leaders and from the Turkish government. Varoujan, like Siamanto, drew on ancient epics and myth as allegories for these aspirations.

His best-known work is The Song of the Bread, a collection of poems celebrating the rural life of Armenian farmers in Anatolia. It remained an unfinished manuscript when he was arrested and killed. According to reports, the manuscript was saved by Turkish officials, and it was published posthumously in 1921.

After his arrest, his convoy was stopped on the road, and the eyewitness accounts of the writer and doctor Roupen Sevag and others describe his torture and death in a forest. His legacy endures in Armenian literature, and his final months were later portrayed in the short film Taniel by Garo Berberian, narrated by Sean Bean.